A variety of medicinal marijuana buds in jars are pictured at Los Angeles Patients & Caregivers Group dispensary in West Hollywood, California U.S., October 18, 2016.REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni/File Photo
- MJ Freeway, a seed-to-sale tracking software platform, suffered an outage this weekend forcing many Pennsylvania businesses to suspend operations
- Washington’s cannabis regulator also announced that MJ Freeway wouldn’t meet an October 31 deadline, and Nevada dropped them 2 years into a 5 year contract
- MJ Freeway was hacked multiple times earlier this year, and some speculate that the company’s code is publicly available on The Pirate Bay
MJ Freeway, a seed-to-sale tracking software platform for the cannabis industry, has struggled in recent months with hacks and outages, forcing some dispensaries to record sales by hand.
The company — which was offered a $10.4 million contract from the Pennsylvania government in April — suffered major disruptions on Saturday and Monday, forcing Pennsylvania’s medical marijuana dispensaries to suspend business, and others to record sales and customer data by hand, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
Seed-to-sale reporting is an important step for bringing legitimacy to the nascent cannabis industry, as well as helping businesses navigate the often byzantine regulations on a state-by-state basis.
Cannabis islegal in some form in 29 states, and each state has its own specific rules about what data businesses need to report to regulators.
This week’s outage was hardly MJ Freeway’s first misstep.
The Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board announced that MJ Freeway will fail to meet an October 31 deadline to run the state’s cannabis tracking software. And, in September, Nevada — where recreational marijuana was recently legalized and business is booming — canceled its contract with MJ Freeway just two years into a five-year deal, and handed the state’s business to Metrc, a rival seed-to-sale tracking firm.
Jeannette Ward, a vice-president at MJ Freeway, told Business Insider in an email that the outages impacted their GramTracker inventory management product, and that the company took the sites offline to resolve the issue. MJ Freeway’s enterprise product platform, which handles payroll and other human resources issues for businesses, wasn’t impacted, Ward said.
Ward provided the following statement to Business Insider:
“On Saturday afternoon and Monday afternoon, we observed performance issues with our legacy Tracker software product. All client sites were taken offline for a period of time on Saturday evening and Monday afternoon to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. On both days, service was restored within a few hours, and client sites are currently live.”
“MJ Freeway engineers made caching system changes to prevent a recurring caching issue, in addition to other changes to address performance and prevent this from recurring. Clients have been communicated with via phone and email with updates. There was no impact to MJ Platform, the recently launched enterprise technology.”
Many of MJ Freeway’s issues can be sourced to an ongoing series of hacks to the software.
In June, the company’s source code was stolen and published on Reddit. And, in January, MJ Freeway was the target of a hack that caused the company’s software to crash and businesses to lose valuable customer data, according to the Cannabis Industry Journal, a business-to-business publication.
MJ Freeway was the target of a sophisticated phishing scheme in September that offered private information about their Washington clients’ businesses.
Users on active subreddit, R/WeedBiz, speculated that MJ Freeway’s stolen source code was posted on The Pirate Bay, a torrent site, exposing the company to a risk of getting continually hacked. Business Insider raised this question to MJ Freeway but has not yet received a response.
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